The Sleepy Jackson – Lovers

Not too long ago, the patchwork quilt of styles Australia band The Sleepy Jackson wove into its first full-length, Lovers, would probably be hailed as a response to cultural fragmentation, media overload, etc.—the usual postmodern suspects. But where Beck delivered such bricolage with a heavy dose of irony and slacker panache, band leader Luke Steel seems to be laying claim to the entire history of alternative music. What he lacks in substance, though, he makes up for in ambition, and you have to at least admire the guy’s sheer hubris. But in the end, Lovers is an album with a deep-seated insecurity. Not unlike other professional rock archivists (cf. Ryan Adams), Steel sounds like a man haunted by the ghost of his own undeniably excellent record collection, the repository of a history he wants desperately to be a part of, but has no idea why.

“Good Dancers” starts with a nod to “My Sweet Lord” and the first example of Steel’s oddly evocative lyrical sense—“Don’t always dream for what you want / But I love to watch good dancers talk.” Scooped background vocals and a lullaby of a string arrangement set up the gauzy, heavy-lidded atmosphere that permeates the album. The Velvets homage, “Vampire Racecourse,” careens and surges with a woolly-headed drone, like hearing “I’m Waiting For the Man” at max volume in the next room while dozing. The constant here is Steel’s chloroformed delivery, sounding like a man trying to engage, to feel… anything. “Rain Falls For Wind” evokes The Church on a dance kick. It’s a minor key lovers’ lament that features more of Steel’s trance-inducing non sequiturs—“I’ve been drinkin and I been thinking of you / Now I know … the snow will let me know.”